Nigeria’s immediate-past president, Muhammadu Buhari, is a fascinating personality; one that means different things to different people. To someone like Mr. Femi Adesina, the ex-president is a man of “personal discipline” and “a patriot who loves Nigeria dearly....Read The Full Story Here ▶
“He is a man with empathy for the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable. He loves them deeply, and they also love him to bits. That is President Muhammadu Buhari for you,” he wrote about Buhari in one of his opinion essays.
Adesina, everyone knows, was Buhari’s spokesperson throughout the eight years the Daura-born politician superintendent over the affairs of Nigerians.
For someone like Mr. Dan Agbese, a veteran journalist and columnist, Buhari is the ‘caricature’ of what he has always been portrayed as.
In a serialised piece titled “Browning the Buhari Mystique,” Agbese wrote: “The Buhari we thought we knew and in whom we verily believed, could not have left the country where it is today – deep in the lurch with aggravated social, economic, and security challenges than he found them.
“Nigeria after the man of myth and oiled mystique is a collapsed nation on the verge of a failed state. All his promises swayed in the wind; his mystique lies like broken porcelain pieces on the rubbish heap of history.
“Buhari promised a nation without its historical baggage. He failed to deliver on his promise. Instead, he left a country in the crisis of survival. What is evident is that the former president failed in his three core promises to the nation. He was a poor and indifferent manager of the economy.
“Buhari overdrew from the bank of immense public goodwill. He disappointed expectations. His policies exacerbated ethnic tension and division in the country. He could not chain corruption, let alone defeat it.
“Corruption was given greater latitude, and men fingered for corruption by the EFCC were given protective berths in the president’s ruling political party. We expected Buhari to give them a wide berth, but his party gave them favored seats, safe from the commission.
“Our country has never been this insecure. We thought that our myriad security challenges would meet their match in the hands of the retired two-star general. But he was indifferent. Our farmlands lie fallow because bandits and kidnappers have driven the peasant farmers off the land.
“President Bola Tinubu inherited all these problems from a man who promoted himself as the best man our country needed to fix all its problems. His myth and his mystique promoted him beyond his capacity – and betrayed him.”
Regardless of the divergent opinions on the ex-Nigerian leader, Buhari apparently is now a “beautiful bride”. His home in Daura is where some political juggernauts have been besieging lately.
Public commentators like this writer and the general public may not be able to fathom the reasons some members of the political elite are flocking around Buhari.
But we should also not be vilified for attaching a political undertone to the ‘surprise visits.’ A few weeks ago, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar was in Daura and met Buhari. Everybody knows that the “Turakin Adamawa” was Buhari’s main challenger in the 2019 presidential election.
Atiku, the media reported, was in Daura to congratulate Buhari and the Emir of Daura for the successful celebration of the last Eid-el-Kabir festival.
Barely 24 hours after Atiku, the immediate-past governor of Kaduna state, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, also stormed Daura. The embattled former governor also met with Buhari, fueling speculation about political intrigues and maneuvers ahead of the general polls in 2027.
If Atiku and El-Rufai had an altruistic motive in visiting Buhari, many social critics and analysts do not believe so. Shehu Sani, a former Kaduna state federal lawmaker in the 8th Senate, maintained that their (Atiku and El-Rufai’s) visits were all plots to unseat President Bola Tinubu in 2027.
He observed that Atiku and El-Rufai want to resurrect the Buhari political charms and fanaticism and mobilise the gullible to another hollow and bewildering end.
Maintaining that the ‘sinister project’ will fail, the former lawmaker, in a social media post, said: “The recent visits by some prominent Northern politicians to Daura appear to be the usual Eid homage, but looking deeper and beyond the facade, it’s surreptitiously a new attempt to build a strong northern alliance using ex-President Buhari as a rallying point to challenge and evict President Tinubu’s Government in 2027.
“It’s a regrouping of Northern political forces for the next general election. A project that will eventually kiss the dust. They want to resurrect Buhari’s political charm, and fanaticism and mobilize the gullible to another hollow and bewildering end.
“They want to stock up and light up the Arewa sentiment without considering the inferno it would eventually generate. The same Buhari that led Nigeria for eight years and left the North worse than he met it. It’s too early to forget. By the time he left power, poverty and insecurity were at their peak more than at any time in Nigeria’s history.
“They had power and wasted it; what do they want to do with it again? A Southerner is in power just for one year. It’s too early for the desperate and power-hungry northern elite to start plotting. The South never did that to Buhari. Their intended action has the capacity of ruining the democratic process and wrecking the fragile unity of the country when the South is awakened to this reality.
“Their obsession with power is condemnable. Opposition to Tinubu from the point of policies, promises, and programs of his administration is a democratic right of any Nigerian. People have the right to speak and criticize the Government.
“But attempts to whip up Northern sentiments to achieve their political ends is a dangerous political experiment and expedition at this material time.” He added, “No serious southerner challenged Buhari for eight years; these power-drunk Northern politicians are dragging the region to a new political journey through a land mine.
“Buhari’s reign ensured nepotistical placement, installation, and dominance of Northerners at strategic positions of authority and power for eight years. Results have shown that they only enriched themselves, pillaged the economy of the country, and pauperized our country.
“The Daura homage of the disgruntled and the obsessed will fail. Our people in the North should reject these faces and their plots. They have nothing to offer. From the abandoned Baro Port, Ajaokuta, Lake Chad basin refilling, and Mambilla hydropower, they failed.
“They came to power when the North was in the hands of terrorists and left it in the joint hands of terrorists and bandits. The Northern Talakawa should reject their antics.” Back to Buhari as the new “political damsel” of a sort.
Last week, it was in the news that a South-east lawmaker in our federal parliament appealed to the ex-Nigerian leader to intervene in the case of Nnamdi Kanu of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB
This followed the visit of the legislator to Buhari in Daura. Recall that the Buhari government in 2021 arrested and returned the IPOB leader to Nigeria from Kenya.
Our politicians may be right to still believe in Buhari’s influential clout, but this writer remains cautious about the extent to which the ex-president can impact their cases ahead of the 2027 general polls. He had eight years to leave a significant mark, yet many Nigerians feel the opportunity (he got) was not fully utilised.
While opinions on his stewardship vary, it is important to approach the idea of Buhari as a ‘political kingmaker’ with a balanced perspective. His legacy is complex, and those looking to him for political leverage should carefully consider both his accomplishments and the challenges he faced, while leading Nigeria.
Till then, the true extent of Buhari’s enduring influence in Nigerian politics cannot be evaluated.
